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Everything on this page is portal-wide. It changes what the whole site looks like, where it lives, and how it’s found — not any single article.

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Theming

A portal’s look is a small, flat set of fields: an accent color, a header text, a page title, a homepage link, and a logo. The logo is an uploaded image; everything else is plain text. There’s no theme editor beyond these — branding here means “identifiably yours,” not a design system.

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Custom domain

By default, a portal is served from Tied’s own domain. Pointing it at yours instead is a two-step process: set the domain, then prove you own it with DNS.
1

Enter your domain

Enter a bare hostname, not a full URL. Host-stripping only runs when you first create the portal — paste https://help.example.com/ there and Tied keeps just the host. Editing an existing portal’s domain is different: whatever you type is saved verbatim, with no stripping, so a pasted https://help.example.com/ stays exactly that instead of becoming help.example.com. Enter help.example.com directly when you’re editing.
2

Request the DNS record

Send the setup instructions to an email address. Tied generates the exact record you need — a single CNAME pointing your domain at Tied’s help center host — and emails it to whoever manages your DNS, which might not be you.
3

Add the record and wait for it to resolve

Once the CNAME resolves, Tied provisions and manages the certificate for the domain. There’s no separate certificate step on your side.
A custom domain has to be unique across every portal on Tied, not just your account — it’s a real hostname, so two portals can’t claim the same one.
By default, Help Center search is full-text: it matches across an article’s title, description and content, weighted so a hit in the title outranks the same term buried in the body, and normalized so a long article doesn’t win purely by repeating a word more often. Partial-word matches work too.
Embeddings-based search exists, behind a flag, and no account can turn it on. With help_center_embedding_search enabled, the public article search matches on meaning rather than keywords — a customer asking “can I send it back?” finds your returns article without sharing a word with its title.The flag is disabled by default and marked both premium and internal-only — meaning it’s gated to super admins, not something any plan or account can self-enable. Calling it merely “plan-gated” understates that.Treat the keyword behaviour above as what every account gets today.

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Visibility

A portal-level archive is a kill switch for the site’s slug URL — separate from, and sitting above, any individual article’s own draft, published or archived status covered in Writing and publishing articles. Archiving the portal takes the slug URL down regardless of what state its articles are individually in — archiving one article changes nothing about the portal or its other content.
That kill switch doesn’t reach a custom domain. The custom-domain lookup runs first and doesn’t filter on the archived flag, so a portal with a custom domain attached (see Custom domain above) keeps serving there after you archive it — the slug URL goes down, the custom domain doesn’t.

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Next

Creating a portal

Slug, branding fields and attaching a web widget.

Writing and publishing articles

Article-level state, separate from portal visibility.

Web chat

Where Help Center search surfaces for a visitor.

Locales and translations

Where allowed locales and the default are configured.